Hinge of the Year
by altschmerz
Summary: It's Danny Williams' first Yom Kippur on the islands, and in taking stock, he has a few things to apologize for. (aka, danny makes an apology tour, and navigates the perils of jewish holidays when none of your friends are jews. gen, team as family, also ft. rachel and grace. season one.)


_this was supposed to be for ktavnukkah but well, it's feburary and almost purim sldfjdsl ah well what can ya do. at any rate! danny williams is a jew: the thesis._

_(title from the poem 'ne'ilah' by marge piercy)_

* * *

"I should've come earlier, I know."

Danny's voice sounds unnaturally loud in the still, empty air of the afternoon. It's a fairly mild day for Hawai'i, a light breeze disturbing blades of placid grass outside the gates far behind him. Once he'd crossed onto the well maintained grassy sprawl of land, the breeze stopped. If Danny were a superstitious man, well…

"I didn't come earlier, though. I was an idiot and a coward and I didn't come earlier. One more thing to apologize for, I guess. May as well start there. I'm sorry. I should've come sooner." There's no response, just more still, empty air. Danny runs his thumb absently over the stone in his hand, well-worn and sea-beaten smooth. He'd picked it up on the walk over, crouching down to pull the rock, barely larger than a marble, from the sand collected in the cracks of the sidewalk.

"Guess I didn't know what to say. 'I'm sorry' didn't feel like enough. But I guess it's the best I can do. I'm sorry. I should've come earlier, and I should've done something. Done what, I don't know, but I should'a done _something._" His voice lapses for a moment, throat dry and uncertain in a way that makes him reflexively irritated. 'Not sure what to say' is not a feeling he's used to or comfortable with. 'Uncertain' is not a look Danny Williams wears well, and he announces as much.

"This shouldn't be so hard," he says to the carved marble, to the memory or the spirit of the man memorialized by it, to the air itself - really he couldn't say what he was talking to, talking perhaps more out of deep discomfort with silence than because he thinks anyone or anything can hear him. "I have _never_ been the guy with the issue saying things - _you_ knew that about me. I have something to say, I say it. This isn't me."

Despite himself, despite his directionless lambast of his own inability to just out with it, Danny stops again, lurching to an unnatural halt. Looking around, at the meticulously cared for grounds of the cemetery, he shakes his head once, hard, clears his throat, and looks straight at the headstone, at the final resting place of his first partner from the islands, the first person that really made him feel like somebody was glad he was there.

"You shouldn't have been alone in that, Meka," he says, abandoning trying to find the right words in favor of finding _any_ words. "I'm sorry you died like that, because it was an awful tragedy, but I'm sorry for before that too. I should've had your back. I should've done better by you, and I'm just... sorry."

Danny stands there, once more as unnaturally wordless as the man he's speaking to, reading a name over and over again like there's an answer somewhere to be found in four letters. But still, Meka says nothing. The headstone he'd gone with Amy to pick out is as silent as the air, as the rock in Danny's hand. After a long time, he leans over and puts the stone on the grave, then kisses his fingers and presses them to the carved name.

It's not something he's proud of, that it took the day before Yom Kippur to finally go back to the grave, to apologize for what part he played or didn't play in what happened to Meka.

It's an easy logical progression, from the first stop to the second, on the Great Danny Williams Hawai'an Apology Tour. Meka wasn't the only person who'd been so shamefully let down by internal affairs, or whose betrayal weighed heavy on Danny's mind, regardless of how little an active part he'd played in it.

Chin Ho Kelly is in his office when Danny gets there, bent over some piece of paperwork or other. He's got a habit of putting it all off to a specific day every other week and then busting the whole stack out in an afternoon, and Danny is frankly in awe of, because he does not have that kind of paperwork-related discipline. For a moment, he stands in the hallway and looks through the glass into his friend's office, pretending he's admiring Chin's ability to burn through two weeks of paperwork in one day in the name of not doing paperwork more than once every two weeks, rather than avoiding the inevitable.

The inevitable becomes, as the inevitable tends to, unavoidable when Chin looks up and motions for Danny to come in. Once standing in front of Chin's desk, he figures there's only one real way to do this. Steeling himself, Danny prepares his elevator pitch.

"I'm Jewish," he starts, and the instant amusement in Chin's sharply raised eyebrows is not helping him get his wits about him for the rather serious conversation they're about to have.

"Are you now," Chin says, voice a complete deadpan. He's set his pen down now, leaned back in his chair with his arms folded over his chest. "See I missed that, what with all the Yiddish and the rant last week about how there's only one synagogue on the islands."

Technically, there's just one _Reform_ synagogue on the islands, but splitting hairs over that isn't why Danny's here, so he waves a hand, dismissing the point without ever voicing it. His hands turn up then, gesturing vaguely in his own direction, as he continues to explain, bypassing Chin's commentary entirely.

"And so..." he says, fingers of his left hand twiddling a bit as he tries to figure out how to phrase this. Another of the frustrations of having moved to this state of perpetual oppressive sunshine is that Danny cannot remember the time he had to explain to a non-Jew what the point of Yom Kippur was. And now he's got three in a row to deal with, hopefully without freaking anyone out in the process. "Okay, once a year, there's a day by which we've gotta think about everything we've done that year, y'know, go back over it all, and find the people we've done wrong, then to go them and eat crow. Y'know. Apologize."

"Okay," Chin says slowly, a wordless 'and' hanging off the end of the drawled word.

"And so here I am, to talk to you." Still, Chin doesn't look like he gets it, so Danny continues. "To apologize."

"Danny, you haven't…" With a shake and a tilt of his head, Chin regards him with a slightly bemused look in his eyes. "You haven't done me wrong. You don't have anything to apologize for."

"Yeah, actually I do."

Normally, Danny might be willing to take the out, to avoid the tough, awkward conversation when possible, but not this time. Not on the day before Yom Kippur. Much as it sucks to drag himself around like this, look the people in his life in their faces and enumerate the ways in which he's failed them that year, he also knows he does it for a reason. Not, as it may be easy to assume, to punish himself, or marinade in guilt. No, he does enough of that trying to sleep at night, cycling over and over his mistakes and his faults as a matter of the daily anxiety that lives as a clawing presence in his mind.

Yom Kippur is not about guilt. Not the way Danny grew up understanding it. Yom Kippur is a reminder, that what you do is important, that the decisions you make have consequences for people outside yourself. Facing up to those consequences, it forces you to think about the things you do and why you do them. It's about accountability.

"When I started with HPD," Danny says, forcing himself to look right at Chin as he says it, "I heard about you. Just around the station, watercooler talk. I knew your name already, when I met you, what they said you'd done. I knew what they were saying, and I knew you'd been ostracized by everyone who knew you because of it."

Chin's face has gone completely serious by now, all hint of confusion or amusement vanished from the faint wrinkles by his eyes. He's watching Danny with a somber expression, though he doesn't look angry or upset by the reference to the way his department had so soundly failed him. Just waiting in wordless seriousness to see where Danny is going with this. Taking a deep breath, Danny does his best to get his point across with a succinctness he's not known for, generally.

"I'm sorry for what the department did to you," he says simply. "And what I'm more sorry for is that I didn't ask the questions somebody should've asked, that there wasn't anybody there to do for you what you all helped me do for Meka. I have never been the guy who writes someone off just cause somebody else told me to, especially not when there's obviously something fishy going on. I should've at least asked more questions than I did, because I didn't ask any, and for that I apologize."

"Danny…" Chin's voice is quiet and heavy. "You didn't… You had no way of knowing."

"And I should've asked. I should've done more to find out," repeats Danny, insistent on his point. "I'm sorry, Chin."

For a moment, the office sits as quiet as the cemetery had. Then, Chin dips his head just once, eyes shining when he looks back up.

"Thank you," he says simply, and Danny nods too, relieved. "That means a lot to me."

"Yeah well…" Danny shrugs, looking away now, around at the room. This is actually the hardest part. Not the apology itself, but rather the awkward milling around left afterwards, the 'how do we transition back to normal' that sits unspoken between him and whoever he'd approached to make amends. In his search for a distraction, something else to focus on or divert the conversation to, Danny spots someone else entirely.

"Hey," he says, turning back, gesturing over his shoulder with a wave of one hand. "I've gotta talk to, do you mind if I-"

"Go," Chin says, face breaking into a grin at the easy dissipation of the solemn, tense atmosphere. "You should hurry, I don't think she's gonna be here much longer."

Kono does indeed seem to be on her way out when Danny approaches her. There's a bag slung over her shoulder and she's in the communal area of HQ, looking around like she thinks there's a chance she may have left something laying around that she's going to need later. Danny crosses the last few feet at a jog, waving to get her attention as he rounds into her line of sight.

The second round of explanations goes over well. Kono doesn't interrupt him with question or protest, though he can see the same confusion in her as there had been in Chin - why are you apologizing to _me?_

"I'm sorry you missed your graduation," he says simply, once he's got through the lead-up. Kono blinks at him, and he can see the amused smile forming before it breaks all the way through.

"Danny…" she says, shoulders moving back like she's about to elaborate on how it's an unnecessary apology for an event far from Danny's realm of responsibility. He doesn't let her get that far.

"I'm sorry you missed it, because I know it _will_ happen again, missing things for…"

Danny's hand moves out, sweeping at hip height around at the whole office, a gesture meant to indicate not just the two of them, but the whole building, all of the world of Five-Oh. Kono frowns, though there's still a smile curving her mouth, smaller now and confused by her furrowed brow though it is. It's the same expression Chin made just a bit earlier. The question asks itself without Kono needing to lend her voice to it.

"I'm sure there was an idea in your head, at the Academy, going up to your graduation, about what your life was gonna look like," Danny explains, hand returning to rest propped against his hip. "Y'know. Typical cop thing, thing I'm sure you watched half your family live. Get a partner, work terrible hours for terrible pay, the same beat all of us walked, and I mean. You got us instead. And right away that tossed a whole lot of bullshit right on your head, and it looks like that's just how it's crumbling for us, cookie wise, and I mean…"

Danny shrugs, looking around again. His eyes flit across office doors, catches a brief glimpse of Chin, once more bent over paperwork.

"I was screwed the instant I got assigned the McGarrett case, and Steve and Chin were already pretty- But y'know. You had a chance at something different, and you got us instead." Seeing her about to interrupt, smile completely gone this time for a defensive, almost insulted look, Danny snorts softly. "Slow your roll, I'm not saying you regret it, or would take the normal route if it was offered to you, all I'm saying is it's not gonna come easy and I'm sorry for what you're gonna lose to this. I'm sorry throwing your hat in with us is gonna hurt like I _know_ it's gonna sometimes, and it's important to me you know we're aware of what this has cost you. Get me?"

The smile is back now. It looks like Kono is gearing up to say something, and Danny cringes, bracing for the inevitable equally heartfelt response to his heartfelt mini-speech. It doesn't come. What comes instead is a quiet 'aww', and before he knows what's going on, Kono's arms are around him and her chin is digging sharply into his shoulder. She's hugging him, her voice just barely tinged with a suggestion of laughter when she speaks.

"That's so sweet of you to say, thank you," Kono tells him, the lightness of her tone letting him off the hook for the drawn out response he'd been expecting. "I signed up for this, I'm gonna be fine, but thank you anyway."

Thoroughly buoyed by two successful 'first Yom Kippur since we became friends' conversations, Danny feels prepared and confident as he sets off towards his third. This feeling of readiness lasts about five minutes into the drive to Steve's place, at which point prickles of anxiety begin creeping up the back of his neck.

(Anxiety, for Danny, never really goes away. It sits dormant sometimes, sure, coiled within him like a hibernating snake, but something always wakes it up, and it always comes back with a vengeance. It's part of the reason Yom Kippur is such a big deal to him. The guilt is always already there, the reality of his flaws and missteps fresh in his mind when he wakes each morning, and once a year, he gets to exorcise them. Once a year, he digs it all up and lays it out and says see, there's hope anyway. I'll make better mistakes next year.)

By the time Danny walks in Steve's front door, bypassing knocking in a way he'd feel bad about if they weren't far past that point by now, he's given himself such an almighty pep talk that he launches right into the main event without any preamble whatsoever.

"I yell," he announces, prompting Steve to look up from… whatever he's doing with what appears to be an assortment of miscellaneous metal bits and a screwdriver, laid out on the table.

"Please," Steve says. The screwdriver waves in a small circle. "By all means, come in."

Another day, Danny would rise to the bait, engage in another round of bickering about knocking and front doors and decorum, but this isn't another day, and he's here for a reason. A reason he needs to get out before he loses both his nerve and the words with which to explain what he needs to get across.

"I yell," Danny repeats, hands raising a bit to gesture up at his own face, then turning out to indicate Steve, "at you. A lot."

Narrowing his eyes, Steve nods slowly. "Yeah? I had, uh, had picked up on that one, buddy."

"And I think," continues Danny, resolutely conducting himself as if Steve has not spoken at all, "that it perhaps comes across that, when I yell, I'm doing it because I'm mad at you."

"Now that you mention it, it does come across that way, what with all the anger and everything."

"Will you _please_ quit interrupting me when I'm trying to make amends, here?"

That seems to bring Steve up short in a way their previous conversation hadn't. His eyes go wide and there's something alarmed there now, but at least he's quiet, which is more than Danny had been expecting, and he'll take it for the opportunity it is. What was supposed to be a composed and comprehensible clarifying explanation of muddied motivations and intent… does not come out that way.

"I worry that when you do the kind of stupid, life-threatening shit that you are prone to _doing_ on a bi-weekly basis, and I then, as a result, yell at your stupid, life-threatening ass about it, it seems like I'm doing it because I'm pissed- and okay, maybe I am, maybe I have a _reason_ to be, because _honestly_ I spend half the time wondering if you do this on purpose specifically to drive me nuts. My point _today_ though, is that it is important to me, in the course of making apologies to the people in my life I have done wrong by, that you understand that is not the _only_ reason. Yes, I am _pissed_ at you, charging into things without telling me what's going on or thinking things through or _so much as waiting for the rest of our team_, and it is my humble opinion that a little bit of yelling is, consequently, justified, but that's not- I'm sorry I haven't been clearer, because I really do think you might not know why else I do it."

In the brief lull after Danny's speech hits its crescendo, Steve stays silent. He's put the screwdriver down, sitting wordlessly and watching with that same unnerved, almost fearful expression that's just strengthened since Danny started talking. It's enough to give Danny pause. He wasn't quite expecting this to be an easy conversation, not even as relatively easy as it had been with Chin and Kono. Not only does Steve seem to derive perverse joy out of making life as hard for Danny as possible in a given circumstance, there's also the matter of the content. In this case, what he's trying to apologize for is much more a personal failure than it was a small or incidental role in a larger problem. Still, this wasn't quite the response he'd predicted.

"You," Danny says slowly, "scare the absolute _hell_ out of me."

The drop of a firing pin could've been heard beside the rush of the ocean outside.

"Into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell rode the six hundred," Danny quotes. "Tennyson didn't mean that as like, a _recommendation_, y'know? Into the jaws of death rode the six hundred, except you're not six hundred, so when you _ride into the jaws of death_ it's just _you_, and then you turn and tell me that I'm the backup like whether or not you make it out of something is a decision _I_ have the ability to make. And then when we _do_ make it out, you look at me like see, what were you worried about, Danny, it's all fine! And then, _then_ I yell, because maybe it won't be fine next time, maybe it almost wasn't fine this time, and I really, _really_ do not want you to die."

It seems that was the breaking point of Steve's ability to keep his opinions to himself. When he does speak, though, it's so far out of the realm of what Danny had been expecting that he has to ask Steve to repeat himself.

"I said, are you sick or something?"

"Sick?" Danny is struck by the sudden and not unfamiliar sense that he and Steve are having two different conversations. "Am I _sick_? What on earth makes you think I'm _sick_?"

"I don't know," Steve says, voice a blend of sarcasm and incredulousness, "the fact that you're going around _making amends_, you're making big declarations, weird apologies, what am I supposed to think?"

"Ah. _Aha._" The laughter bubbles up from deep in his chest as the anxiety snaps, breaks into relief. "Oh, babe, no. I'm not- This has never actually happened to me, y'know, everyone says to _explain_ to people what you're doing if they're not- But it never actually- I'm not sick, Steve. I'm fine, but it's Yom Kippur tomorrow, and so…"

"Oh." The moment it clicks for Steve is actually visible on his face. "_Oh._"

"Yeah, so. What I'm _trying_ to apologize for is not being clear that _why_ I'm yelling at you when you do the…" Danny waves, circling his hand around the invisible breadth of Steve's more extreme behavior. "The _things_ that you _do_ sometimes, isn't because I'm mad. It's because I'm scared, on account of I do _not_ want you to die, and that seems sometimes to be a greater priority of mine than it is of yours. So. I'm sorry for not making that clear, and I hope you get it now."

Again, Steve is knocked silent. To be fair, Danny doesn't know what _he'd_ say to a declaration like that either, and it's probably going to take a few Yom Kippurs yet for Steve's emotionally repressed ass to finagle some kind of coherent response. Instead of saying anything, he's just sitting there with this disarmed look about him, surprised and vulnerable in a way Steve only gets when you catch him completely off guard. He looks like he's had stitches ripped open, nerve endings exposed and damaged, ready at any moment for another shoe to drop and crush him. There's only so long Danny can stand seeing him look like that, more honest than he's ever seen Steve, before he breaks the tension.

"Am I sick," he snorts. "Am I _sick_, he asks. Shows you what I get for befriending a guy who knows nothing about being friends with a Jew." And Steve laughs.

Things de-escalate from there. Danny sits down and the air relaxes, something in it diffused. They talk for a bit about Danny's family, traditions of holidays past, the apologies he's already made today. Steve asks if there's any left he has to take care of, and Danny nods.

"I'm done except for Grace, I'm gonna go talk to her when I leave here. It's easier with kids; they don't really get tied up in knots about it the way adults do. They take you at your word and it's forgotten anyway fifteen minutes later. Should be good for her, though." A faint smile tugs at Danny's mouth as a childhood's worth of Yom Kippurs runs through his mind, his mother kneeling next to him and holding his hands in hers, a silver ring inscribed with the _Sh'ma_ glinting on her right hand. "It's good for kids to hear their parents apologize to them. Teaches 'em they're valued, y'know. That they're respected and important."

The words have hardly left Danny's mouth before he regrets saying them, wants to apologize all over again for grinding salt into wounds he's only just barely began to guess the shape of. He tries to pretend he doesn't see the way Steve flinches, just a little bit, and before he can think of a way to hastily but subtly change the subject, another thought occurs to him, and Danny cringes.

"Oh, and Rachel. Her too."

That seems to distract Steve too, and he asks, "Wait, Rachel? You're apologizing to Rachel too?"

"Yep." A heritage of exasperation and apologies to people you don't want to apologize for seeps into Danny's voice, and Steve raises his eyebrows.

"Saying sorry to your ex-wife, that doesn't sound easy, atonement holiday or not."

"If it were easy," Danny sighs, looking up at the ceiling, "it wouldn't be Jewish."

Steve chuckles, and it was only halfway a joke.

On his way out the door, Steve stops Danny with a hand on his shoulder. Danny doesn't have the opportunity to ask the question before he gets the answer in an abrupt hug, Steve's arms tight and unexpected around him.

"Okay," he mutters, hands hovering for a moment before settling onto Steve's back. A few seconds pass and Steve doesn't break contact, and Danny hugs him back a little harder, one hand moving to the back of his neck. "You alright?"

For several more moments, Steve doesn't answer, and then he pulls away, saying dismissively, "Yeah. Fine, just... Thanks."

It's much like the conclusion of his talk with Kono, and yet somehow very distinctly different. Danny's own words flit through his mind, _teaches 'em they're valued, y'know, that they're respected and important_, and he smiles gently.

"Don't mention it. Just… Try and remember what I said, yeah?"

When Danny gets to the house, Rachel is expecting him. She lets him in the door with a casual greeting and calls for Grace, and the two of them stand in the front hall making mild small talk until the girl comes barrelling down.

"Danno!" she hollers, and Danny drops to one knee just in time to catch a rocket masquerading as an eight year old girl slams into him. Off to the side, he barely notices Rachel slipping out into another room, focused instead on hugging his daughter, feeling all over again the terrifying and astonishing impact of parenthood.

"Hey, monkey," he breathes, holding her tightly before pulling back. Danny puts his hands on Grace's shoulders and studies her face, her bright eyes and excited smile. It's not one of his days with her, so he has to do what he came here to do and head back home, but he can't help but take a moment to grin at her, see her grin back, and enjoy the simple reality being this kid's dad.

"Are you here 'cause of Yom Kippur tomorrow?" Grace asks, and Danny nods.

"Yeah, I'm here 'cause of Yom Kippur Tomorrow. Do you remember what we talked about, about Yom Kippur, Grace?" They've talked about it before, an explanation given that gets slightly more complex, more nuanced, each year she gets older, more able to understand intentions and apologies and the point of both respectively.

"It's not about us being bad it's about how what we do matters and we need to take _accountability_." She says the last word with all the serious intent and deliberate pronunciation of a young child repeating a word that makes them feel grown up, one they've heard an adult say over and over again. "Right?"

"Yeah, that's right. And I'm here to take accountability, okay? You know I do everything I can to be the best dad I can be, and that I love you more than anything." Danny's voice is solemn, and it's a struggle to maintain the sober tone of the conversation when Grace rolls her eyes affectionately and nods. "Hey, I mean it. I do the best I can, to be here, but I know sometimes things get in the way, work especially. And I want tell you I'm sorry for when that's happened, and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure it happens less this year."

She hugs him again, and it's over far too quickly, Danny headed for the door, stopping on the threshold to speak to Rachel. He grits his teeth and looks up for a moment, searching for his resolve, and reminding himself why he does this. If it were easy, it wouldn't be Jewish, right?

"Rachel, I need to apologize to you," he says, and she frowns, obviously thrown.

"What for?"

"This move, it's sucked." Danny's words are frank and to the point, no time to waste dressing up what he needs to say before he'll run out of the nerve to say it. "I've hated it, and it's been a massive adjustment, but there have been… _times_, over the months I've been here, that I've taken that out on you in a way that was… not entirely fair. I can do better than that, and I don't have to be happy about this, but you have the right to expect me to do better, so. I'm sorry, Rachel, and I'm going to try."

She stands there and stares at him, mouth slightly open like she wants to say something in return but can't quite find the words. Danny gives her a nod, taps the doorframe, and turns to leave, not really able to blame her. He wouldn't know what to do with that, either. But he had to say it, and it feels like something's been lifted off him now that he has.

"Daniel."

Rachel's voice stops him as he turns away down the steps, and he looks back at her. She's standing in the doorway with her arms curled around herself, the same way she's always stood when apprehensive, unsure of what she's about to do or say.

"I'm sorry too," is what she says, and Danny's a little ashamed of himself for being surprised. "This change, it hasn't been easy on you, and I won't apologize for the choices I've made, but I will apologize for its impact on you. I know it's been hard, and I'm sorry."

Danny smiles at her, it's only a little stiff, just barely strained, and says, "Thank you."

When he turns back towards his car, walks away from the house and the apologies he's left there, Danny feels the breath of a new year, cool against the back of his neck.


End file.
